Kobo
Abe's Friends
Friends (Tomodachi)
Kobo Abe
tr. Donald Keene
Grove Press, 1969
The play, in
thirteen scenes with an intermission comprising the seventh, is a crime report,
briefly, concerning a robbery and murder in one of the big cities (it was
premiered in Tokyo). A family of thieves break into a man's house, imprison
him, fleece him and give him poison before moving on to their next victim,
laughing.
The modus operandi
is a skillful, beguiling face beaming with “neighborly love" (as
Donald Keene translates it), two policemen called to the scene merely observe a
family diagreement. A reporter welcomes the new arrivals as members of a secret
society he would like to join.
It could be one of
Nabokov's plays (and bears a certain resemblance to Lean's film of Doctor
Zhivago in the redistribution of living space), with a studied air of Kafka
("The Metamorphosis" springs to mind) and a recombination of
Beckett's Eleutheria, unpublished at that time.
The man's apartment
superintendent appears in Scene Seven "among the spectators, both in the
lobby and in the auditorium," to distribute a leaflet explaining her
detachment in Scene Five with the policemen, "An Appeal", in which
she denies taking money from the family or entering into any sort of
relationship with them, on the contrary, "I will take an oath that I am
speaking the absolute truth when I say that the first time I ever laid eyes on
those people was when I first saw them in Apartment 12."
